Wondering how to automate multi-channel sales management in Unleashed? Whether you’re trying to automate multi-channel fulfilment or your Shopify integration lacks flexibility, TIDE is the solution to your eCommerce automation puzzle.
Shopify is a great platform for managing integrated TikTok, Amazon, and other marketplaces. You might offer drop-shipping or use Shopify POS, but how do you manage these order types in your Inventory System? Handling multiple sales channels, locations, and order groups in Unleashed requires more than simple integration – it needs TIDE.
Selling on Marketplaces with Shopify
Marketplaces like Amazon, eBay, and TikTok Shop open doors to a larger customer base for online sellers. Shopify is the ideal platform to integrate with these channels, offering SEO tools and easy order management. Combined with Unleashed and Xero, you get a complete eCommerce automation solution. Almost…
Most off-the-shelf integrations struggle to filter orders by source, destination, or other concerns. This prevents assigning orders to the correct categories or fulfilment locations without manual intervention, making complex fulfillment and granular reporting much more challenging.
That’s where TIDE comes in. TIDE is an immensely flexible automation tool that connects eCommerce stores to inventory management systems (IMS) and accounting platforms. With its own Transformation Engine, TIDE can read order data, apply conditional logic, and dynamically assign sales to the correct category and fulfilment location, apply the correct status, and much more. You should handle marketplace orders, dropship orders, point-of-sale (POS), and pre-orders each in their own unique way. TIDE automatically manages them to best suit your business process – all through a single Shopify connection!
Read on to find out how.
What is TIDE, and how can it automate my business?
TIDE is a cloud-based automation tool that integrates with Shopify (and many other platforms) to synchronise eCommerce business data. Orders, refunds, stock updates, product details, shipments, order statuses, and customer details can all be kept in sync across different systems. TIDE stands out because it acts as an intermediary between source and destination systems. It adds eCommerce data into its unique data object, the TIDEObject. Then, you can apply coding logic to flexibly process each order based on its unique conditions.
The key, then, is to ensure that TIDE receives enough information for TIDE’s Transformation Engine to use. For smaller businesses, Shopify’s API provides ample information about an order to build a working solution, but for larger businesses who require a more complex, more granular integration, particularly for reporting and fulfilment, relying on Shopify’s webhook technology is not always enough.
How can Shopify Flow improve my business automation?
Enter Flow, a first-party app by Shopify introduced in September 2017.
Flow lets users build a journey of conditional nodes, automating tasks in their online store. It serves as a crucial stepping stone to elevate eCommerce integration to new heights.
While Flow has many uses, it offers the following key benefits for integration purposes:
- Control when orders are picked up
- Manage risk
- Support post-purchase apps, upsells, and order editing
- Add promotional items to orders
- Support conditional syncing (automatically sync some orders, but not others)
- Add tags to orders, to customers, or to products
- Manage multi-channel order sources by sending specific HTTP requests to a specific integration.
When sending Shopify orders to an IMS or accounting solution via TIDE, these are all useful features. But when it comes to correctly and automatically filtering and sorting orders, however, using Flow to add tags and managing multi-channel sources are the correct features for our automation requirements.
In TIDE, an Integration applies a unique set of conditions and settings to all orders passing through it. Plus, each integration can have their own set of destination systems, or different destinations within the same system. For example, one integration may manage individual customer accounts, with each uniquely identified by their email. Conversely, the other integration may compile all orders into a single account. With one integration, one could send all orders to Unleashed, while the other to Xero, and so on.
Some marketplaces, such as Amazon or OnBuy, don’t provide a customer email when sales pass into Shopify, but other platforms like eBay do. It’s likely, then, that one may wish to manage these types of orders differently. Shopify Flow allows users to filter orders by the app (i.e. their source integrated marketplace) that created it, after which they may be sent to different TIDE integrations. Amazon orders may go to Integration A, while eBay orders to Integration B.
Let’s subdivide our concerns further. What if you sell on Amazon, and offer both Fulfilled by Merchant (FBM) and Fulfilled by Amazon (FBA)? Depending on your business process, you may wish to send your Amazon FBM orders to your IMS for picking and fulfilment, but not your FBA orders, since these are not handled by your business directly. Shopify Flow can send FBM orders to your TIDE integration, while keeping FBA orders only in Shopify.
TIDE and Shopify Flow improve eCommerce automation together
One of our clients, Wave Direct, worked with us at TIDE to build a solution that encompassed the entire lifecycle of an order. Orders originate from a third-party marketplace, move to Shopify, then to Unleashed, and return when completed and shipments are dispatched. While a relatively complex solution, the broad aim was simple: assign each order to an order group and warehouse in Unleashed that corresponds to the original source of the order.
The client had several third-party marketplace integrations – Amazon, Walmart, Mirakl, eBay, Kingfisher, and more – with each needing to be identified. Flow sorted these by app, dividing orders into two integrations: Amazon orders, and non-Amazon orders.
On top of filtering orders, Flow also pre-processed them, so that TIDE’s Transformation Engine had all the data it needed to apply conditional logic. For example, Flow passes the fraud risk level as an order tag, which TIDE identifies and uses to send high-risk orders to a “High Risk” order group in Unleashed.
Flow tags Amazon orders as FBA or FBM based on fulfilment type. TIDE uses these tags to sort orders into the correct Unleashed warehouse. This ensures accurate stock allocation and proper processing by third-party logistics (3PL). Because external partners fulfil FBA orders, TIDE autocompletes them in Unleashed.
Summary
TIDE stands out as the automation tool when it comes to enabling flexible fulfilment, and granular reporting. Its Transformation Engine is the key, powering dynamic sorting and transformation of sales by applying code to the order data.
Shopify Flow makes TIDE better, by sorting orders by origin and pre-processing their data with crucial information like tags and promotional line items. It’s this added information that benefits TIDE’s Transformation Engine, by filling the order with key information to help TIDE dynamically route and assign orders with different fulfilment requirements, all on a single Shopify connection, with no need for manual intervention.
If your business integrates Shopify with Unleashed, and would benefit from flexibly automating multi-channel sales management, then consider TIDE as your more-than-integration integration!